


“Aracaelia ‘Celly’ Ylessia Retrac Organa: Not a Hypochondriac, Just Force-Sensitive and Rather Telepathic, Thanks All the Same!”

by Polgarawolf



Series: Star Wars: You Became to Me [33]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alliances, Assassination, Civil War, Expanded Universe Character(s), F/F, F/M, Families of Choice, Family Drama, Loss, Love, M/M, Masks, Miscarriage, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Poison, Politics, Royalty, Sacrificial ethics, Secrets, Sith, Sith machinations, Slavery, War, dark side
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-15
Updated: 2008-06-15
Packaged: 2017-11-13 12:18:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/503473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polgarawolf/pseuds/Polgarawolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is fifteen random but essentially chronological moments from the life of Aracaelia ‘Celly’ Ylessia Retrac Organa, the eldest of the three half-sisters of Bail Prestor Organa. There is an actual story here – one small thread among the vast woven tapestry of life that is the living history of the galaxy, stretched out and twisted, knotted into the whole, curled down among the roots of time, connecting various moments together – but one must read between the lines to capture it. It is not precisely the truth, for the subtle story of these moments is sketched out here in words, and, in the sin of writing down a life, it inevitably changes the shape of things. But it is nevertheless a form of truth. (From a certain point of view . . . )</p>
            </blockquote>





	“Aracaelia ‘Celly’ Ylessia Retrac Organa: Not a Hypochondriac, Just Force-Sensitive and Rather Telepathic, Thanks All the Same!”

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning:** This story functions as a sort of compressed codex for Aracaelia ‘Celly’ Ylessia Organa’s life, as she is going to be written (or at least referred to) in my not even nearly complete AU **Star Wars** series **_You Became to Me_**. If anything doesn’t make sense, please feel free to ask!
> 
>  **Author’s Notes: 1.)** Again, this is compatible with my SW AU series **_You Became to Me_** , including my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, if you squint at a couple of things sideways and view a few others solely through the lens of Aracaelia ‘Celly’ Ylessia Organa’s eyes. **2.)** Although this is technically modeled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere on the LJ (I don’t recall from where anymore, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info for the community in question here in my notes), it’s not really meant to function as a response to the challenge associated with that set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Celly. **3.)** Readers should please keep in mind that Celly is fairly strong in the Force – specifically, her telepathy is extremely powerful for a non-Jedi – and that, while she certainly hasn’t been raised as a Jedi, she has still received quite a bit of training (some of it quite specialized) at the hands of an Alderaanian former (i.e., retired) Jedi Healer and Master, Kylea Santeri, with occasional help/input from both Obi-Wan and Anakin. **4.)** Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters like Celly should please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ! For clarity’s sake, though, please know that I specifically picture the following, when it comes to Rouge’s family and such: Celly when grown as Alexa Davalos (with nearly black hair and deeply tanned skin); Rouge when grown as Julia Roberts (with red/cinnamon hair and a very good tan); and Tia when grown as a somewhat golden-skinned Catherine Zeta Jones. Please note that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain family members of EU or original characters, for example) are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and that readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish! **5.)** Celly may be young, but she isn't an idiot. She knows all about Padmé Amidala's love for Obi-Wan, just like she knows about how much Padmé and Sabé love one another, just like she knows about how Bail is in love with Obi-Wan, too. **6.)** Readers should please keep in mind that words that appear Gaelic in nature or else modelled on Gaelic terms are meant as place-holders for non-Basic words (in this case, Alderaanian, unless it's a curseword she picked up from Anakin, in which case it's probably Huttesse). If anything doesn't make sense in context, please just ask, and I'll send an English approximation for the word/term!
> 
>  **Story Notes:** **1.)** Since this is part of a larger on-going AU series that in some respects fairly closely mirrors or follows events of canon (up to a certain point, anyway), readers should please keep in mind that certain characters and events from the prequel movies/novelizations of the films and even events/places/people referenced in the EU or Expanded Universe may be mentioned or alluded to in this story. If anyone has any questions about whether someone or something is AU, canon, or EU canon, please feel free to ask! **2.)** Readers should probably be aware that I am roughly estimating (guestimating might be a better word) the original publication date for most of the character study pieces in the **_You Became to Me_** series (and indeed most of my stories, especially the ones written over a long period of time), based on when I roughed out notes for them in the story notebooks I carry everywhere with me and when I can recall having worked on certain groups of characters. The year is going to be accurate, but the month might be off and the day will almost certainly be randomly chosen, since the online account I had originally posted many of these stories to no longer exists. I tend to go back and edit things that are in series whenever I get the time or a new idea causes me to have to make room for something else plot-wise, and odds are good that a story could have been edited for typos as recently as the day of its posting here, but the original version will likely be much older and fairly close to the publication date that I attach to it, if anyone's curious!

**“Aracaelia ‘Celly’ Ylessia Retrac Organa: Not a Hypochondriac, Just Force-Sensitive and Rather Telepathic, Thanks All the Same!”**

 

 **01.) Family:** Traditionally, though the throne has occasionally passed among various off-shoots and distaff branches of these families (such as the Retrac and Metonae clans), one of three noble families holds the throne of Alderaan – the Organa family, the Antilles family, and the sadly now extinguished Servano line (which originated largely from a blending of the Organa and Antilles families, approximately eighteen hundred years after the founding of the Galactic Republic) – but the families are so closely intertwined, due to generations of intermarriage (many of them closely scrutinized before being permitted, in an effort to avoid partnering cousins so closely related that their offspring might be at risk for the kind of hereditary defects that sometimes arise from breeding too much, too closely, amongst the same basic genetic stock), that it’s often somewhat difficult to puzzle out which precise member of which family has the most lawfully strong claim to the throne at any given time, which is why there was such a furor after her father’s second wife’s death that it required a Jedi Master to come and help sort things out properly, and also why Celly sometimes wonders if it might not make more sense for their people to do as they do on Chandrila and hold elections amongst the various members of those families so that they can avoid potential arguments (which, if allowed to carry on too long, could possibly become acrimonious enough to drive permanent wedges between what are, essentially, different branches of the same basic families) over which person is more suited to become Queen or Crown Prince of Alderaan.

 **02.) Throne:** When she was very little, Celly used to wonder why her Uncle Bail (well, okay, _technically_ her honorary uncle, not her real uncle by blood) always seemed so tired and gloomy, and it wasn’t until she was old enough to understand that the claim he and his sister (and the Antilles clan in general) had on the throne of Alderaan had been rejected in favor of another’s claim and that he had also lost his bid to become Supreme Chancellor of the whole Galactic Republic to Palpatine because of the sentiment stirred up in favor of the Senator of Naboo, due to the illegal (brief) occupation of his homeworld by the Trade Federation, that she began to truly comprehend why such an air of bitter disappointment and exhaustion constantly dogged her grim Uncle’s shadow.

 **03.) Diplomacy:** Celly isn’t particularly interested in politics – it seems to her that there’s a disproportionate amount of incompetents and _sleemos_ who get elected and that supposedly sentient beings are entirely too easy to manipulate and can be made to do the most ridiculously stupid things imaginable by those able to play on their emotions (especially their fears and their hatreds) – but she knows that her position as a Retrac Organa is going to keep her in the public’s eye, and so she’s very careful to learn and to practice basic diplomacy, so she can hopefully make a good enough impression to at least mostly be left alone by the media.

 **04.) Force:** The Force is something that is as much a natural part of her as her hair or the color of her eyes, and it amazes her, sometimes, that there are not only some sentient beings in the galaxy who don’t believe in it, but that there are others who so hate and fear the Force that they would either shun as unnatural or put to death as witches or demons Force-sensitives such as herself, if given the chance.

 **05.) Hero:** Obi-Wan Kenobi is Celly’s hero from the moment she first meets him, and, whenever she feels sad or angry or disappointed with people or the galaxy in general, all she has to do is remember him – the light in his eyes, the brilliance of his shy smile, the way all of the warmth and power and _Light_ of the Force seems to crowd in close around him, like a mother constantly hugging a much-beloved child near to her heart – and she instantly feels a thousand times better.

 **06.) Tutor:** The _bamáuhme_ (or nanny) their mother secured for her and her sisters is really less a glorified babysitter than she is a private tutor, and it never quite fails to amaze her a little how much she’s managed to learn to do with the Force since _úimma_ Kylea (former Jedi Master and Healer Santeri) began watching over them.

 **07.) Politic:** She adores her older half-brother, Bail, and so the sting of disappointment, when he does the politic thing and marries Breha – an Antilles, as Jedi Master Jorus C’baoth so strongly suggested that he should do, when he named Bail the rightful heir to the throne (to consolidate the two families with the clearest right to the throne into one line), and someone much younger than Bail and clearly infatuated as much with the notion of being the mother to the next heir to the throne as with Bail himself – instead of following his heart and finding someone he truly loves (or at least cares for as much as he obviously cares for Obi-Wan), is all but overwhelming.

 **08.) Headache:** She doesn’t exactly _dislike_ Breha – the young woman obviously means well (her good intentions are all but _deafening_ , at times. She many not be particularly strong in the Force, compared to Celly or her sisters or Bail, but she’s almost _painfully_ single-minded and the sheer amount of focus she bends upon her wants and hopes makes those desires glaringly obvious, even to those trying very hard to be polite and not notice), and she loves children and dotes on her husband and honestly does seem to try very hard to be the perfect wife for Bail, always playing the part of the loving and supportive and endlessly gracious lady of the house, when in the public’s eye – but there is a certain amount of excessive clinginess and vacuousness to the woman’s thoughts that sets Celly’s teeth on edge just enough to make her go out of her way to avoid the new Queen of Alderaan as much as she can, in an attempt to avoid the headache that she almost inevitably gets from being around her for any extended period of time. 

**9.) Mask:** She doesn’t understand Rouge’s fascination with makeup and fancy clothes and shiny things that sparkle, and it isn’t until her sister rather exasperatedly asks her how in all the worlds else she thinks that a person can keep the public and the media happy and too distracted to try to pry beneath the lovely glittering mask of the persona presented to them, by such a dazzling display of fashion savvy, that Celly understands just how clever her little sister actually is.

 **10.) Love:** The last time Obi-Wan brings Anakin to Alderaan to visit before the outbreak of the war, her youngest sister, Tia, has a horrible nightmare about their planet being destroyed (a light from some hugely round machine hits their world, and it explodes into a rapidly expanding cloud of dust and jagged fragments, as if it were no more than a clod of dirt hit with a hammer): it isn’t until Anakin himself has come in to investigate the screams and solemnly promised the frantic girl that he’ll never allow anyone to blow up their world that Tia can be calmed back down and convinced to go back to bed, and it is in that moment, when she sees a quietly proud Obi-Wan place an approving hand on his Padawan’s shoulder, to turn him back towards their shared suite, and Anakin essentially literally lights up – eyes blazing love, smile beaming with warmth, the very air around him seeming to flare and snap and crackle with a sudden influx of power, light like the crawling corona of a building electric charge dancing around him – that Celly begins to suspect that maybe Jedi aren’t _quite_ as immune to love as their Order likes to claim they are . . . and to try to plot ways to find out whether or not Obi-Wan lights up in the same way, sometimes, for Anakin, too. 

**11.) Like:** Mon Mothma reminds her of her half-sister, Alaina (all fierce determination and earnestness and oddly juxtaposed bouts of painful blushing shyness and limitless charisma); Sabé is like a softer, sadder, less powerfully surrounded by the Force Obi-Wan; Dormé is so very like Anakin that Celly is always half expecting to either see her up to her elbows in some strange machine, happily tinkering away, or else swinging merrily from a rafter because it mimics the sensation of flight; Sheltay is like a quieter version of Celly’s mother; and Padmé . . . well, Padmé alternates between reminding her of Sabé, of Dormé, and, of all people, Breha, and it frightens her a little, sometimes, to see how changeable and fickle the former Queen of Naboo and now Senator of the Chommell Sector can be.

 **12.) War:** They all knew that the war was coming, of course, but it’s different, knowing that something bad is coming and having to live with the reality of an on-going disaster, and so there are days, sometimes, when Celly desperately wishes she could be as self-centered as Breha and just ignore all the awful things happening in the galaxy and focus so solely on her own wishes and happiness that she stops caring about everyone and everything else.

 **13.) Crawl:** She and her sisters are probably some of the only non-Separatists who’re thrilled by the news that Palpatine has been kidnapped, and they are unabashedly satisfied to discover that he was the other Sith Lord all along and that Anakin and Obi-Wan have slain him in battle: the man always made their skin crawl (Tia especially always had a horror of him), and they’ve long suspected that there was something seriously not right with their Supreme Chancellor, and it’s rather nice to discover that they were right about him all along. 

**14.) Poison:** For such a noble and influential (and, one would think – or at least _hope_ , anyway – protected) family on a world as traditionally peaceful as Alderaan, the Organa family has suffered more than a few violent deaths, of late – her father’s first wife, Zamille Antilles Organa, died when she threw herself between a hired assassin and her elder fraternal twin sister, the Queen; her father’s second wife (Queen Mazicia, having wed in order to fulfill both the wishes of her heart as well as a promise sworn to her dying twin to “take care of Prestid”) perished in a mysterious airspeeder crash that many suspected (and still suspect) to be the work of either hired assassins or treasonous saboteurs (or both, working together); her father’s third wife, her mother (Alessya Retrac Organa), outlived her husband, for he died when a diplomatic mission to the Outer Rim world of Galidraan went horribly awry and his entire party (including his two eldest sons) fell prey to a virulent biological contaminant being tested against a living populace under the guise of a local outbreak of plague (an artificially created sickness that many thereafter came to suspect may have been the work of Jenna Zan Arbor); Zamille’s oldest girl, Merisol, died at age fifteen of a mysterious wasting sickness that was later proven to be a botched attempt by incompetent assassins (who were, at least, caught and prosecuted and had the decency to die in jail) to poison her half-uncle, Bail Antilles (and Zamille’s two youngest boys, Declin and Valyn, of course died with their father of a manufactured plague, on Galidraan); Mazicia’s only child was killed while still in the womb (nearly five months before she could have viably been born, though Prestid insisted on inscribing Mazicia’s tomb monument with the legend of mother and child, even going so far as to name the girl Cammyia), when her mother was slain; Mazicia and Zamille’s own mother, Queen Nellinda Servano Antilles, was poisoned (and rather painfully killed) by her own secretary of state, and her husband (Bailen Antilles) later died of wounds taken in defense of his second wife, Nellinda’s younger sister, Nesanna (who, unfortunately, did not long outlive her husband, partially as a result of a dangerous blaster wound and partially as a result of the early and difficult birth of her daughter, Rehuria); and, as for Bail Organa (who was eventually ruled the rightful heir to Alderaan’s throne, after the violent deaths of the two previous Queens), well, Force alone only knows how many children Aracaelia’s older half-brother lost to miscarriages (several of them quite violent) before finally losing his wife, as well, when Breha’s ship was unceremoniously attacked and destroyed by the remnants of Separatist fleets fleeing from an apparently failed attempt to seize Coruscant (which, in fact, later turned out to be a smokescreen for the kidnapping of the Supreme Chancellor and Darth Sidious’ plans to get rid of Darth Tyranus and to turn Anakin Skywalker into a Sith Lord) – and so Celly, for one, has never lost sight of the fact that even a family born to rule is just as (if not more so) vulnerable to disaster and attack as any other . . . which is precisely why she’s so glad that her mother is a certified Healer and a highly paid, quite successful surgeon and medical professor. 

**15.) Wedding:** The moment they find out that Obi-Wan and Anakin have pledged themselves to each other, she and her sisters start planning a lavish wedding, and only the death of Breha keeps them from mentioning the subject to the two Jedi Bendu when they finally come to Alderaan, though they quietly promise each other that the sadness currently gripping the family doesn’t mean that they are going to let the idea of a proper wedding go unspoken for forever . . .

**Author's Note:**

> In order to more easily keep track of Bail’s family, readers might want to keep the following in mind: in my AU, Bail is born practically in 68 BBY, near the end of what would have been 69 BBY (if events had fallen out as they do in canon, that is), or roughly 954ish years After the Ruusan Reformations and 46ish years Before the Battle of Geonosis (which, remember, occurs in my AU series on Holiday 2 or Productivity Day of the Galactic Standard Calendar, the day that falls in between month five, Nelona, and month six, Helona, in year 25,001 After Founding [of the Galactic Republic] or 1,000 After Ruusan Reformations), with Alaina being born in what would have been ~46 BBY. (Their mother, Zamille dies late in 44 BBY, and their father, Prestid, remarries in 42 BBY, wedding Mazicia and then losing her late in 40 BBY. [I’ve interpreted the EU notation that Mazicia was Queen of Alderaan in the time leading up to the Clone Wars as meaning around the time of the Stark Hyperspace War, which in the EU is sometimes lumped in with the galactic civil war leading up to the establishment of the Empire, due to Palpatine’s tendency to rewrite history, even though it actually happened in 44 BBY.] Prestid then remarries again in 35 BBY, to Alessya Retrac, who has Celly, Rouge, and Tia in ~32, 30, and 28 BBY. Meanwhile, Bail becomes the Crown Prince of Alderaan a few months before he turns twenty-eight, late in 41 BBY. That’s a bit early, given the retcon of Jorus C’baoth’s date of birth, but it fits my Bail and frankly I’m more inclined to go with Zahn’s original date of birth for his character and just presume that the Force would’ve preserved C’baoth to the point where he seemed much younger than he actually was – as often seems to be the case for human Jedi, in both canon and EU, who either haven’t lived extremely hard lives or else dabbled yet overmuch in areas grouped under the heading of the Dark Side of the Force – than to simply trust the retcon and try to arrive at a probable time frame for the Alderaan Ascendancy Contention by adding roughly forty years or so to that date, given Winter’s guestimate of C’baoth’s age in a hologram taken during those proceedings.) Bail and Alaina’s deceased brothers, Declin and Valyn, would have been born in roughly 50 BBY and 48 BBY and died (with their father) late in 28 BBY (not long after Tia was born), and their deceased sister, Merisol, would have been born in roughly 67 BBY and killed in 52 BBY.


End file.
